The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
In various scenarios, network devices act on packets based on layer 7 classifications. In an example, a network device receives a packet, and performs deep packet payload inspection to search for specific strings in the packet to determine the network application which the packet is associated with, and then acts on the packet according to a policy for the network application. The payload inspection typically requires elaborate and expensive classification engines and can be overly time consuming for some applications.